What means the gradual development in the brain of the cerebrum and cerebellum, the organs of the soul powers, enlarging from generation to generation? These are scarcely visible in the lowest animals. They become larger as we advance up the animal scale of intelligence, or psychic power; large in the ape, who came far along the same line that man came; four times as large in the lowest Zulu as in the ape, but far larger in the European and American civilized man—thus slowly made perfect through awful struggles and sufferings, painfully growing a million years or more. Is it not then reasonable to believe that there is a corresponding psychic or soul development from generation to generation in the unseen individuality, the ego, which uses the cerebrum and cerebellum as organs; that up the spiral stairway of evolution the whole man has come,—his personality, with its soul powers, and the physical organs of these powers in the brain, and the entire physical man? To-day, in the unfolding embryo of every child, nature marvelously and clearly retells the history of the evolution of the physical nature of the human race from the one-celled moneron to the billion-celled man. For the embryo of the child is a historic map, done in flesh and blood, of the evolution of man, of the forms he has assumed, broadly speaking, as he climbed nature’s stairway.[F] Is it hard to believe that our individuality has been born and reborn through the line of ancestry back to the type-lives, and through them back to the “beginning,” when God took of His own life to develop, through ages of conflict, personalities other than His own who would, of their own free will, choose goodness? Is it hard to believe that at every successive birth each parent has placed his stamp upon the individuality, but that the individuality has perdured being reborn again and again into successive higher kingdoms? Does it seem hard to believe that we should be born many times? Is it then harder to believe that we should be born _after_ we have lived than that we should be born when we have not lived? The profoundest mystery is in the first birth, in which we all believe. And why should it be thought by us incredible that, with the mingling of the parental cells, the individuality exactly fitted should be reborn in the line of heredity, receiving the parental stamp, being attracted by the law which answers to that law which guides the atom unerringly to its place in the crystal—that same law wonderfully exalted? Whatever and wherever character is, it must be obedient to the law that draws it, for the law of attraction is even more irresistible in the inner world than is the law of gravitation in the outer world. Every man as he comes to his birth comes to his own place; in a profound sense he _chooses_ his parents and his surroundings. As he was, he is, plus his birth-gain and his growth through consent and volition; his past leads him.